Rita Carter's Mapping the Mind promises to provide its readers with a bird's eye view of the latest scientific knowledge of the relationship between brain and mind. Working explicitly against the Cartesian notion that the mind is wholly separate from the brain, Carter surveys current research in the neurosciences that traces our world of mental experience to specific aspects of brain function. The potential consequences of the new understanding of brain and mind generated by these studies, she observes, range from new brain-directed therapies to treat depression and eating disorders, to altering the physiological basis of consciousness to the point of inducing a crafted virtual reality. Regardless of what we ultimately do with this information, Carter intends to make clear that the mind is almost wholly explicable in terms of brain function, and along the way to speculate as to what this means for individuals and the future of societies that embrace it.

In terms of its presentation, Mapping the Mind is a colorful piece of work, reminiscent of undergraduate textbooks with its frequent (and sometimes lengthy) sidebars, occasional boldfaced terms, and extensive use of crisp illustrations and images. The writing is generally at about the same level, making it very accessible, even to those with little memory of biology class. Nor is it a particularly long book, weighing in at just over 200 pages even with the many illustrations noted above. So what does Carter do in the space of the eight chapters that constitute her book? She covers many of the popular aspects of brain-mind studies, including emotions, perception, language, memory, and consciousness. She references many of the sensational phenomena known to the field, including "alien hand," the "hot spot" in the brain for religious experience, post-traumatic stress disorder, false and recovered memories, and phantom limbs, to name a few. For those unfamiliar with one or more of these phenomena, Carter's book is a goldmine of curiosities, and, it is worth observing, she treats them fairly responsibly. What makes her treatment different (at times) from conventional textbooks on psychology is that she tries very hard to tie these phenomena to structures (and sometimes chemical activity) in the brain. Thus, for example, she explores memory with an eye towards locating specific kinds of memory in distinct parts of the brain, using this information to suggest why Alzheimer's victims can retain some kinds of memory (in this case, procedural memory) while losing all others.

Although the title and jacket copy imply that brain imaging studies drive the discoveries revealed in the book, Carter's presentation relies equally, if not more so, upon information drawn from historically well-known case studies (Phineas Gage, H.M., Genie), conventional neuroanatomy, genetically-inherited disorders, and, more controversially (and less explicitly), Evolutionary Psychology. Indeed, Carter makes frequent recourse to explanations for behavior that have less to do with "mapping the mind" and more to do with the burgeoning field of Evolutionary Psychology, which seeks to explain common, basic human behavior in terms of an evolutionary adaptationist framework. In other words, our basic psychological mechanisms are presumed to be the result of Darwinian natural selection, which means that we have them today because they served to improve our ancestors' survival value. Thus Carter goes questing after the adaptive value of our ability to appreciate music, as the only reason we would have it today is if at some point in our evolutionary past (typically, the Pleistocene era) it proved somehow to make us more "fit." While this is not the place to take up a critique of the EP approach to mind, Carter's questionable commingling of EP with more reliable information from brain imaging and case studies suggests that she does not wholly understand (nor make clear for her readers) the speculative quality of EP relative to the reliability of her other resources.

As an introduction to some of the key connections between brain and mind that have been discovered over the history of psychology and the neurosciences, Mapping the Mind is not a bad book (aside from its ill-suited ventures into EP hypotheses, as noted above). It certainly won't present any new information to anyone who has already done some casual reading in the field, but for the armchair philosopher of mind, the Oliver Sacks aficionado, or the reader who was intrigued by news of the latest fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) study that splashed the pages of Time, Carter's book should serve as an accessible, even lively, introduction to the brain-based study of mind.

James Luberda is in the PhD program in English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. His research concerns the intersection of cognitive science, literary studies, and composition.

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